Origins and Initial Development of Western Centrism: Enlightenment Thinkers' Encounters With Chinese Philosophy

ABSTRACT

“Western‐centrism” refers to a worldview centered on Western civilization with an explicit belief in the superiority of Western cultures to non‐Western cultures in all aspects. How did it come into being? When was its intellectual foundation laid? Who made the formative efforts to establish it in intellectual thought? This essay suggests that as a systematic thought, its formative stage was set in the beginning of the Enlightenment and became an established intellectual belief before the modern era. In the course of its formulation, major Enlightenment thinkers laid its intellectual foundation. Its philosophical roots arose in some influential Enlightenment thinkers' encounters with Eastern intellectual thought, especially Chinese metaphysics, political theory, and moral philosophy. This essay focuses on some Enlightenment thinkers including Leibniz, Wolff, Quesnay, Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel, and other thinkers. By examining how Chinese philosophy served as a mirror for European thinkers to reflect on European thought and helped them formulate their own philosophical views, it attempts to show how the success and failure of cross‐cultural dialog lay the intellectual foundation of Western‐centrism and what lessons should be drawn from the intellectual encounters for future cultural exchanges.